On 25 March 1966 The Beatles went to Bob Whitaker’s Chelsea studio for a photo session. The session was originally intended to make photos for the cover of (and/or to promote) their forthcoming single, Rain/Paperback Writer.

Clearly, band and photographer were all determined to create something more than the run-of-the-mill publicity shots. Among the resulting images was that which has since become known as the “Butcher” photo, depicting The Beatles waerring white coats and draped with dismembered doll parts and slabs of meat.

La Butcher Cover selon Bob : "I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with tne Beafles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown cf what is regarded as normal.
The actual conception for what I still call "Somnambulant Adventure" was Moses coming down from Mt. Sinai with the 10 Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf.
All over the world I'd watched people worshipping like idols, like gods. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading."

"John played with all sorts of bits and pieces before we actually did the picture. I did a few outtake pictures which were of them actually playing with a box full of dolls which they pulled out and stuck all over themselves. There was an enormous amount of laughter."

"The cover of the album Yesterday and Today was an unfinished concept. It was just one of a series of photographs that would have made up a gate-fold cover. Behind the head of each Beatle would have been a golden halo and in the halo would have been placed a semi-precious stone. Then the background would have contained more gold, so it was rather like a Russian icon.
It was just after John Lennon had said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. In a material world that was an extremely true statement."

Three images are those intended to be the three parts of the triptych. The first photo shows The Beatles facing a woman with her back to the camera, her hands raised as if in surprise (or worship) while The Beatles hold a string of sausages. This was meant to represent the 'birth' of the Beatles, with the sausages serving as an umbilical cord.
Whitaker explained: "My own thought was how the hell do you show that they've been born out of a woman the same as anybody else? An umbilical cord was one way of doing it."

The centre panel of the triptych is the image nowadays referred to as the “butcher” photo. Bob’s intention was to add other elements to it which would create a jarring juxtaposition between idolisation of The Beatles’ as gods of the pop world and their flesh and blood reality as ordinary human beings.
There was even George Harrison banging nails into John's head with a hammer. This was intended to demonstrate that the Beatles were not an illusion, not something to be worshipped, but people as real and substantial as "a piece of wood". The actual conception of what is termed the ‘Butcher's Sleeve’ is a reasonably diverse piece of thinking.

The project entitle 'Somnambulant Adventure' would have been in gatefold form and the cover shot would have been the 'butcher' picture. Inside there would have been other photos taken at the same session. These were of:
- The 4 beatles holding sausages in front of a little girl
- John holding a cardboard box with '2,000,000' written on the side above Ringo's head
- George hammering nails into John's head
- Paul and George with their heads in a canary cage

These pictures would have been 'touched up' in similar ways to the front cover.
Why? Apparently Bob Whitaker wanted to represent the relationships between birth, life and death !
He got the idea for the 'butcher' picture from a German artist of the 1930's, Hans Bellmer, who had pictures of dismembered dolls in one of his books, 'Die Puppe'.

"Having finished that particular picture, it was snatched away from me and sent off to America. It was reproduced as a record cover without ever having the artwork completed by me. The cover layout was somebody else's conception...
I was just trying to show that the Beatles were flesh and blood.”

Capitol printed the cover in early June, using the “Butcher” photo, and the release of the album Yesterday and Today was scheduled for 15 June 1966. The reaction came back that the dealers refused to handle them. And to avoid any possible controversy or undeserved harm to the Beatles' image or reputation, Capitol has chosen to withdraw the Butcher sleeve LP and substitute an unremarkable Whitaker shot of the Beatles gathered around a large steamer trunk, taken in Brian Epstein’s office.
It was rushed to America, where Capitol staff spent the following weekend taking the discs from the returned "butcher” sleeves and putting them in the new sleeve. Several thousand copies of the original cover were destroyed and replaced by the ‘cabin trunk’ sleeve, but Capitol eventually decided that it would be more economical to simply paste the new cover photo over the old one.

After the album was released, news of the ‘paste-over’ operation leaked out, and Beatle fans across America began steaming the cabin trunk photos off of their copies of Yesterday And Today in the hope of finding the “butcher” cover underneath.

Okay, before you get all bent out of shape, technically speaking this isn't a banned album. Capitol Records elected to "withdraw" it prior to general release. That technicality out of the way, 1966's "Yesterday & Today", commonly known as the "butcher" album is probably one of the world's most sought after record collectables. People prize it, willingly paying hundreds, even tens of thousands of dollars for a copy (particularly for first state copy - explained below) even though it's a far more common item than generally recognized.

So what's the story behind this one ?

More than willing to cash in on Beatlemania, Capitol Records decided to continue its program of squeezing out new Beatles product from previously released English material. In this case the company pulled together a mixture of six tracks found on the two previous English released albums, but deleted from the American releases, a previously released British single and three tracks drawn from the in-progress "Revolver" album.

What was different about the product was the cover featuring the smiling Fab Four posed in butcher smocks surrounded by an array of raw meat, decapitated nude dolls and body parts.

Insensitive to the fact the cover was at best tasteless, Capitol printed up an estimated 750,000 copies of the cover, along with a wide array of promotional material. Advanced copies and some promotional materials were provided to DJs and retailers, but in the wake of complaints about the gruesome nature of the cover, Capitol hastily decided to recall the albums and all of the promotional item.

Destroying the promotional material, the original sleeves were modified by slapping a rather bland photo of the band in front of a steamer trunk. Since the new covers were glued over the old, it didn't take people long to figure out they could peal or steam the new covers off in order to see the original sleeve.

So why'd they do it ?

For years the rumor mill claimed it was a response to Capitol's ongoing "butchery" of their albums - as discussed above, the company literally carving up the English releases in order to generate additional product for the American market. While the band were clearly unhappy with Capitol's marketing efforts, that wasn't the reason for the cover.

John Lennon was quoted in an interview as explaining the cover as "inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it"

Alan Livingston was President of Capitol during that timeframe and in an interview with Mojo magazine said "He [Paul McCartney] was adamant and felt very strongly that we should go forward." "He said 'It's our comment on the war"

A Somnambulant Adventure

Australian photography Robert Whitaker is actually credited with the concept (and the photo).
Whitaker's Beatles connection stemmed from some 1964 pictures he'd taken of Beatles' manager Brian Epstein during the band's Australian tour. Impressed with the results, Epstein hired the photographer with the result being Whitaker spent the next five years documenting the band.

Over the years both Whitaker and the individual Beatles have commented on the cover; all agreeing that the photo (along with a slew of alternate takes) were done out of a sense of boredom and as a commentary and reaction to the public's ongoing adulation.
Entitled "A Somnambulant Adventure", Whitaker's original concept called for the band to be seated in front of a gold background, surrounded by jeweled halos. Interestingly, the picture chosen for the cover turned out to be one of the raw, unfinished photos he'd taken at an earlier session.

Q: How did that photo, featuring the Beatles among slabs of meat and decapitated dolls, come about? Was it your idea or the Beatles'?
It was mine. Absolutely. It was part of three pictures that should have gone into an icon. And it was a rough. If you could imagine, the background of that picture should have been all gold. Around the heads would have gone silver halos, jewelled. Then there are two other pictures that are in the book [The Unseen Beatles], but not in colour.

Q: How did you prepare for the shoot?
It was hard work. I had to go to the local butcher and get pork. I had to go to a doll factory and find the dolls. I had to go to an eye factory and find the eyes. False teeth. There's a lot in that photograph. I think John's almost-last written words were about that particular cover; that was pointed out to me by Martin Harrison, who wrote the text to my book. I didn't even know that, but I'm learning a lot.

Q: Why meat and dolls? There's been a lot of conjecture over the years about what that photo meant. The most popular theory is that it was a protest by the Beatles against Capitol Records for supposedly "butchering" their records in the States.
Rubbish, absolute nonsense. If the trilogy or triptych of the three photographs had ever come together, it would have made sense. There is another set of photos in the book which is the Beatles with a girl with her back toward you, hanging on to sausages. Those sausages were meant to be an umbilical cord. Does this start to open a few chapters?

Q: Were you aware when you shot it that Capitol Records was going to use it as a record cover?
No.

Q: Were you upset when they did and then when they pulled it and replaced it with another photo?
Well, I shot that photo too, of them sitting on a trunk, the one that they pasted over it. I fairly remember being bewildered by the whole thing. I had no reason to be bewildered by it, purely and simply, because it could certainly be construed as a fairly shocking collection of bits and pieces to stick on a group of people and represent that in this country.

What, then, was the point behind the photograph? As Whitaker explains it, the idea for the photo session came about because both he and the Beatles were fed up with taking market-friendly publicity pictures. John Lennon, in an interview shortly before his death in 1980, echoed this sentiment: "It George and John was inspired by our boredom and resentment at having to do another photo session and another Beatles thing. We were sick to death of it."

Whitaker had intended the session, of which the butcher photo was only one part, to be his personal comment on the mass adulation of the group and the illusory nature of stardom. As he later said, "I had toured quite a lot of the world with them by then, and I was continually amused by the public adulation of four people . . . "

Une représentation donnant une symbolique spirituelle clairement assumée par le photographe : "It was part of three pictures that should have gone into an icon. If the trilogy or triptych of the three photographs had ever come together, it would have made sense. I wanted to do a real experiment - people will jump to wrong conclusions about it being sick, but the whole thing is based on simplicity -- linking four very real people with something real. I was trying to show that the Beatles were flesh and blood."

Puis, il rajoute comment les choses se seraient présentées : There is another photo which is the Beatles with a girl with her back toward you, hanging on to sausages. Those sausages were meant to be an umbilical cord. I got George to knock some nails into John's head, and took some sausages along to get some other pictures, dressed them up in white smocks as butchers, and this is the result -- the use of the camera as a means of creating situations."

To that end, what he had planned was a triptych of pictures, something resembling a religious icon, to make the point that the Beatles were just as real and human as everyone else. The "butcher" photos, along with the other pictures from that session, are included in Whitaker's books of Beatles photographs, The Unseen Beatles.

La session-photo s'est tenu à Londres le 25 mars 1966, dans un studio du quartier de Chelsea, au 1 The Vale.
Voici le détail des photos qui ont été prises lors de cette session et l'explication qui va avec :
The first picture shows the Beatles, facing a woman who has her back to the camera, and hanging on to a string of sausages. This picture was supposed to represent the 'birth' of the Beatles, with the sausages serving as an umbilical cord.
Whitaker explained: "My own thought was how the hell do you show that they've been born out of a woman the same as anybody else? An umbilical cord was one way of doing it."

The photograph that would have been used for the other side of the triptych is one of George Harrison standing behind a seated John Lennon, hammer in hand, pounding nails into John's head.
Whitaker explained that this picture was intended to demonstrate that the Beatles were not an illusion, not something to be worshipped, but people as real and substantial as a piece of wood.

The center of the John and Ringo triptych (and the only pose taken in color) was to to have been the infamous butcher photo, showing the Beatles surrounded by slabs of red meat and dismembered dolls.
This picture was actually titled A Somnambulant Adventure, and its intent was to present a contrast, something shocking and completely out of line with the Beatles' public image.
As Whitaker revealed, the picture used on the Yesterday and Today cover was a rough, unfinished version : "If you could imagine, the background of that picture should've all been gold. Around the heads would have gone silver halos, jeweled. The finished picture would have offered a striking contrast between the Beatles' angelic image and the reality of the photograph."

A fourth picture, apparently not planned as part of the triptych (Whitaker isn't clear about this, mentioning only three pictures in his interview), can also be found in The Unseen Beatles. It features John framing Ringo's head with a cardboard box, on one of the flaps of which is written "2,000,000."
Whitaker again: "I wanted to illustrate that, in a way, there was nothing more amazing about Ringo than anyone else on this earth. In this life he was just one of two million members of the human race. The idolization of fans reminded me of the story of the worship of the golden calf."

That's all there is to it. The butcher photo was, as Whitaker says, snatched away and eventually used out of context.
As happened so many other times where the Beatles were concerned, someone retroactively invented an explanation for something that was mere coincidence or happenstance, and to a public largely willing to believe almost anything about the Beatles, it became an accepted truth.

Sur la première image du triptyque, voila comment il la présentait : "The front cover was to be a picture of them holding two strings of sausages coving out of the nether regions of a lady. The sausages are meant to be an umbilical cord. And then that image was going to be inset inside a pregnant woman's womb, and there was going to be an illustration of a breast with a nipple and a big womb, and the four Beatles laying inside her tummy all connected to an umbilical cord."

Sur la dernière : "John would actually have had a transparent film of wood grain over his face so that he looked like a wood block, which gives some explanation for why George is banging nails into his head. There would also have been a horizon with the sky where the water should be and the water where the sky was."

"If you could imagine, the background of that picture should have been all gold. Around the heads would have gone silver halos, jewelled. The [Butcher] cover was an unfinished concept. It was just one of a series of photographs that would have made up a gate-fold cover.
Then the background would have contained more gold, so it was rather like a Russian icon. It was just after John Lennon had said that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus Christ. In a material world that was an extremely true statement."

"Around their heads there would've been silver halos with precious stones and then the whole of the rest of it would've been like a Russian icon - silver and gold, so that I've sort of canonised them and put them into the church. The meat is meant to represent the fans, and the false teeth and the false eyes is the falseness of representing a god-like image as a golden calf."

Only Whitaker knew the exact manner in which the triptych would have been assembled, and he offered several different explanations prior to his death in 2011.

The first image, slated to be the cover of a gatefold sleeve, depicted a woman with her back to the camera, genuflecting before the Fab Four, who stand clasping a string of sausages. According to Whitaker, this represented the "birth" of the Beatles, humans like everyone else. "The sausages are meant to be an umbilical cord," he said in a 2004 Mojo profile. "And then that image was going to be inset inside a pregnant woman's womb, and then there was going to be an illustration of a breast with a nipple and a big womb, and the four Beatles laying insider her tummy all connected to an umbilical cord."

The second image, the famous "butcher" shot, conveyed the idea that the Beatles were in danger of being dismembered – both physically and psychically – by their celebrity. "It would've been two-and-a-quarter-inches square in the center of a 12-inch sleeve," Whitaker told Mojo of the photo. "Around their heads would have been silver halos with precious stones and then the whole of the rest of it would've been like a Russian icon – silver and gold, so that I've sort of canonized them and put them into the church. That meat is meant to represent the fans, and the false teeth and the false eyes is the falseness of representing a god-like image as a golden calf."

The third image shows George Harrison hammering a nail into a blissful John Lennon's head. Unlike the illusion of fame, the musicians were as real and sturdy as a piece of wood. "John would actually have had a transparent film of wood grain over his face so that he looked like a wood block," Whitaker later recalled. "There would also have been a horizon with the sky where the water should be and the water where the sky was."

Despite, or perhaps because of, these grandiose concepts, the Mop Top icon was destined to remain incomplete. Reasons are unclear to this day, but only the "butcher" photo made it to the record label. "They didn't have the other pictures – the keys to unlock it. So it was a cock-up, and I guess it upset a lot of people." Whitaker lamented in Mojo.